Sorry, Mr. Raphael, but I'd be happy to read more pieces from Peter Birkenhead. And don't give me that crap about publishing being worse than not publishing.

I'm a writer, but didn't feel qualified to call myself one until I'd actually published something. I write twice a week for a daily - not a huge daily, but a daily nonetheless. I joke that writing is one of the only professions that everyone believes they're going to get around to one day. If you say you're a brain surgeon, nobody in the room says "yeah, I was going to operate on someone this year...I had a really cool idea for synapse bypass".

If Birkenhead is great on the stage, maybe he should go back to it. I know of no Hollywood plastic act-ors -regardless of their paycheck- that make my heart beat faster.

But he should definitely keep writing. He's smart, he's funny, and he's a welcome relief from the whiney confessional upchuckings that have characterized too much literature of late.

Any career where there is the prospect of a big payout has a lot of frustration on the margins. The people at the peak are happy. The people edging towards the underemployed or unemployed margin are frustrated, stressed, and confused about their lack of success despite theirr obvious talent. The people towardst the highly successful side of the margin are worried about losing their position, their talent, and feel tied to expectations. You see this with doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, actors, artists, and so on. Is there a way to find just the right amount of success to be perfectly balanced between the two margins? Maybe, but the reality is that in any highly competitive and potentially lucrative field you are either worried about how you are going to get there or how you are going to stay where you are. Ultimately, you have to ask yourself is the stress and frustration worht the payout, if it is then go for it and if not try to find a career that is very steady.

In all fairness though, all careers even the steady ones have their frustrations. I know a few teachers, a job where there are very few dizzying highs - like having a top-rated sitcom - and few dizzing lows - like being told that despite your talents at the field you will never advance - but it is frustrating none the less. The Swiftian moral of the story, inherit, so tell your parents that if they haven't amassed a fortune yet that they need to get cracking. I hear that actors are rolling in the dough.

Also, I wonder how many people hit control-n, and went straight to IMDB to look him up? Or was I the only one?

I almost skipped this story thinking that I wouldn't be interested. But a personal slice of life written well has appeal that goes beyond its subject. I appreciate Salon's finding new voices and topics for personal essays.

I'm both an actor and writer, living in L.A., and manage to squeak out a living, though I've never worked in television. Not that I ever wanted to. I started off working in what used to be called B movies as an actor only, was basically handed a writing career through circumstances too complicated to explain, and have since continued to work in so-called independent film, which means writing scripts for people way outside the mainstream loop and, occasionally, acting in them.

Like almost everyone who winds up in this business, I had the usual childhood dreams about movies, but I grew up in the seventies, as did, it would seem, Peter Birkenhead, and had hoped for a very different career from the one I have -- and I don't mean in the monetary sense, either. I had the delusion that good films would always be made in Hollywood, that new Altmans and Coppolas would come along to replace the old ones, and if I worked hard enough, maybe I'd wind up as my generation's Christopher Walken or Robert DeNiro. I studied in New York with highly reputable teachers, hung around the Actors Studio, and was cast in my first feature -- a lead -- barely out of high school. I received the shock of my life when I moved to L.A. and realized how little most people in the film business actually care about films. On the set, they want to do their jobs with as little effort as possible and get the hell out of there. Off the set, they're just trying to plot their climb up the ladder. Hollywood is every bit as superficial as cliche would have it, though not quite in the ways it's usually portrayed. Emotional and social ties are thimble-deep. People rarely speak their own minds, and they'll freeze like deer in the headlights if you make the mistake of doing so yourself. The conversation isn't unlike what you'd find in a Midwestern hair salon: Brad and Angelina, who got cut on "American Idol," who really deserves to win an Oscar. The fact that it's taking place in the heart of the industry doesn't make it an iota more insightful. Whatever its alleged politics, I've found L.A. -- or at least the L.A. of the film world -- to be be deeply conservative. Can you say Squaresville?

At this point, now in my early forties, I regard the film business as a way of making a living -- and not even a very good living. I almost never see movies, since they're just plain awful, and have no idea where I'm going or how I'll fend for myself when the work has dried up completely. I stupidly didn't prepare myself for a second career, and my entire life has been absorbed in creative work of one kind or another, so I'm really not fit to work a 'normal' job. Of course, this was the risk I took, as Peter Birkenhead took it too, and I live with the consequences every day. Kids? I'll probably never have them. Women? They're not interested in losers like me. I do have a few ideas on how to improve things, but everything here is a crap game, and even success would mean at best a few lucrative years of cranking out costume jewelry. I have successful friends -- or I did, before they became successful -- but even they, for the most part, aren't terribly happy. To paraphrase Robert Mitchum: "Success doesn't mean you get to do better; it means you get to do more."

I'm painting a bleak picture, I know, but I have managed to find one oasis. The east side of L.A. features maybe the most vital underground music scene in the entire country -- possibly, at this moment, in the entire world. I'm really too old to fit in, but somehow I do, and the musicians I've gotten to know over the last few years stick to their guns as people in the film business almost never do. They're far more substantial, they're doing what they do for the sheer love of doing it, and none of them are overly concerned with where they'll be in ten or twenty years. They're still young, of course, but I do take a lot of inspiration from being around them. And guess what? All this takes place right under the nose of Hollywood, and those who work there have no idea it's even there. Which is why I'm never bothered by those questions Birkenhead mentions: "What have you been in? Is it anything I might have seen?" No, and you probably never heard Giant Drag on the radio, either. So who cares?